The Family Game(86)

Do not look at her face, I remind myself. If you do see it, you will never forget it. Do not look at her face.

I thrust my hands deep into the brown water. They make contact as expected with cold slippery flesh and tangled-up clothing. She is hard and soft at the same time, like rotten fruit. I slip one arm under her and cradle her body up towards the surface.

Do not think, I remind myself, just do.

She breaches the surface white and bloated, the stench overwhelming. I gasp in spite of myself. A bare shoulder comes into view but I keep my gaze elliptic, skimming over the edges of what I see as I handle it. Mousy brown hair tangled into wet swirls curled against the grey-white flesh. It’s Melissa. Aliza had jet-black hair. Melissa is wearing a red blouse, rotten and water-logged. Khaki slacks, a belt. Each image I let in is an image I know will haunt me. I’ve played this game before. I know how it goes. Then I locate it; a sliver necklace around her bruised throat.

I focus only on that, my torch gritted between my teeth. I catch the edges of her chin, a bottom lip thick and purpled. Her hair is so close to my face; the smell, too much.

The silver of her chain twinkles, and as her head tilts back into the water, I use my free hand to turn her necklace. The charm on it glistens into view, winking in the torch light. It’s a star. A sparkling diamond star.

That is all I need.

I let her sink back into the water and she disappears, the pool eddying around her until it is still once more. I do not have time to mourn. I think of Melissa’s family, her friends perhaps unaware she is even gone yet, and my heart is full of sadness.

I am shuddering enough to ripple the water around me now. I need to get warm or risk hypothermia. I need to get out.

I scramble across to the ladder and haul my soaking body out, cold hands raw against the rope.

My Christmas Eve present, and whatever fresh hell that might entail, is hidden under a star. And I know exactly where I might find one of those.





46 Something Clicks




Sunday 25 December

I barrel back across the lawn towards the house. There’s a chance I could still win this, if everyone else has been going through the same awful things I have.

I push from my mind what might happen after this game ends. My desire to call the police and confess everything just so I can drag the whole Holbeck family kicking and screaming to justice is pretty heady, though I know I’d only go down with them.

Right now, I tell myself, I just need to finish this game. I need to win – and when I know every single thing each of these people have done, I will decide what I should do with that knowledge. I’m going to beat them at their own fucked-up game and then I’m going to beat them for real.

I scramble past the maze and on to the ornamental garden, my trainers slipping in the snow, my muscles erratic and juddering from the cold. Ahead, the lights of the house are warm and inviting and so close.

Something catches my trainer and sends me sprawling forward into the snow, knocking the air from me.

I roll over, arms up to protect myself, but there is nobody there. I rise on my elbows and look at what tripped me. There’s a half-buried welly jutting from the snow.

Immediately I know whose boot it is; she was standing here with me in them spewing bile less than an hour ago. Dread rises inside me as I clamber to my feet.

‘Fiona,’ I call softly, but there is no one there.

I scan the ground for footprints and in the beam of my torch, her tracks appear heading back towards the maze. Judging by her gait, and the fact that she didn’t stop to retrieve her boot, she must have been running. Something must have scared her so much that losing a boot seemed irrelevant. Something tells me to ignore this diversion and carry on with my own game, but if something happened to her, even though I don’t like the woman, I’m not sure I could live with that.

At the maze’s entrance, I notice a torn piece of red silk flapping, snagged on a low branch.

Oh God. Not in the maze, seriously?

If I’m going in there, I need something with a bit more heft than the paperweight in my pocket. I look around the maze’s entrance for something, anything, I can use as a weapon. I really only have one option. I squat over the wooden maze arrow sign and heave it from the frozen ground. It pops out of the earth after a few wiggles and I fall back, a sharp wooden stake in hand.

At the maze’s entrance, I raise my right hand to the wall and start to run, branches whipping across my open right palm as I go.

‘Fiona,’ I call ahead, doubting a response but eager to interrupt whatever might be going on ahead of me. Then I recall that when I was talking to Fiona earlier, she was carrying a shovel.

It’s only now that I wonder why?

It crosses my mind that she might be waiting for me in here. She has a weapon; this could all be a trick of some kind. And just as I’m thinking how unlikely it is that Fiona might want to hurt me, I remember what the baby inside me stands to inherit. Everything she would get would be taken from Fiona’s children. People have killed for much, much less.

I round the next corner and pull up short. There is a spray of blood in the snow, the ground disturbed, like in the aftermath of a struggle. Beyond the patch of scrambled mud and melted snow, I see another set of footprints in the snow. Someone was waiting in here for her. She must have run straight into them. The new set of footprints is the only one that continues on into the maze, but the red drip continues with it, a red dotted line in the whiteness.